John Adams, the Founding Father who served two terms as George Washington’s vice president, loathed the job as a waste of his time and talent.

"My country," he once wrote in a letter to his wife, Abigail, "has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived."

And so it has been ever since. Daniel Webster, the great orator and statesman who declined numerous offers to serve as vice president, scoffed at efforts to pair him with Zachary Taylor in 1848.

"I do not propose to be buried," Webster said, "until I am really dead and in my coffin."

Vice presidents have come and gone, but the office has always been viewed as irrelevant — that is, unless you’re named Dick Cheney.

So it’s a bit curious to see the aggressive pursuit of the job by U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican. The GOP has yet to select its nominee, but that hasn’t stopped Rubio from measuring the drapes at the official residence.

Rubio, according to Politico.com, has hired an A-list team of political advisers and is rushing to publish his memoirs ahead of a rival — and more critical — biography by a Washington Post reporter. He’s even paid an opposition research firm $40,000 to conduct a background check on himself.

All of that ambition is fine, except when it puts his own interests ahead of his constituents in Florida or his neighbors along the Gulf Coast.

Rubio’s desire for higher office almost certainly is the basis for his inexplicable vote against the RESTORE Act, which would direct fine money from the BP oil spill to the Gulf states affected by the 2010 catastrophe.

It’s bad enough that Rubio opposed legislation critical to the Gulf’s recovery process — and that received rare bipartisan support in the Senate. What’s worse are his public statements misrepresenting its provisions, which have complicated efforts to get final approval in the House.

Rubio, in an op-ed published in several Florida newspapers, described the proposal as a "midnight deal" that would raise taxes, create a new environmental bureaucracy and send millions of dollars to pay for pork projects in Hawaii, Alaska and the Great Lakes.

That was a sharp reversal from last July, when Rubio stood with Gulf Coast lawmakers to introduce the act. So why the change of heart? You could start by asking Grover Norquist, a conservative lobbyist described by some as the most powerful man in Washington, D.C.

Norquist controls the votes of nearly 300 lawmakers through "The Pledge" — a written commitment to oppose any and all tax increases. Rubio, who signed the pledge in 2009, jumped when Norquist warned that any senators voting for the RESTORE Act would be held in violation of their pledge.

But the accounting guidelines used by the act — under an arcane provision known as Worldwide Interest Allocation — would keep 80 percent of the BP fine money on the Gulf Coast, and allow only a portion of the interest to support coastal projects elsewhere in the U.S.

And it would not raise taxes, according to the Congressional Budget Office. But Rubio, who needs Norquist’s blessing if he’s going to join the GOP ticket, wasn’t leaving anything to chance. His March 8 vote against the act made him the only senator from a Gulf Coast state to oppose the legislation.

"This is no longer a Gulf Coast restoration bill," he said in a news release following the vote. "It’s a federal power grab that exploits the BP spill to pay for special interest projects driven by the usual ‘what’s in it for me’ Washington mentality."

Those and other comments drew a rebuke from watchdog Politifact.com. The respected arbiter of political doublespeak gave Rubio a "half-truth" rating for his claims, noting strong support for the legislation from a majority of Florida voters — including Republicans and Tea Party activists.

The Pensacola News-Journal, in a blistering editorial, said Rubio’s "self-serving explanation of his vote against the RESTORE Act ... can’t disguise how shocking and disappointing the vote was."

The act is currently stalled in the House, where it is awaiting approval as an amendment to a broader transportation spending bill. The irony for Rubio is that, should it not succeed, all of the BP fine money will be routed to the U.S. Treasury, with no guarantee that it will return to the Gulf Coast states.

That would be a costly defeat for the region, and an expensive price for one man’s political ambition. All for a shot at an office that most view as an empty prize.

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George Talbot’s column runs Wednesdays. Reach him at 251-219-5623 or gtalbot@press-register.com.